Porn Site Says Revealing Takedown Notices Infringe Copyright

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Porn Site Says Revealing Takedown Notices Infringe Copyright

Perfect 10, the porn website that bills itself as displaying "the world's most beautiful natural women," claims that disclosing its copyright takedown notices is a little too revealing.

The copyright-infringement allegations are part of Perfect 10's ongoing lawsuit against Google, a suit with a tortured procedural history. In 2007, a federal appeals court rendered a far-reaching decision, saying search engines like Google were not infringing copyrights by displaying thumbnails and hyperlinking to Perfect 10's perfect babes.

Chilling Effects is a repository of takedown notices and has published thousands of them for scholarly research. Perfect 10 claims Google's actions amount to copyright infringement because Perfect 10's takedown notices include the nude pics.

The takedown notice was born in 1998 under the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA allows websites to host user-generated content free of being liable for copyright infringement if the website promptly responds to takedown notices from the right holders by removing the content. Viacom, in an unrelated case against Google, is challenging that process – one that it says will "destroy copyright."

Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, started the Chilling Effects site about eight years ago "to educate the public and to provide transparency around the notice-and-takedown process," she said in a telephone interview Thursday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also become involved, telling the appeals court in a filing this week that "Chilling Effects serves the purposes of the DMCA by facilitating research and education about online copyright policy, and by making possible an evaluation of the extent to which Congress' goals for the DMCA are being met in practice."